Observation Scheduling and Automatic Data Reduction for the Antarctic telescope, ASTEP+
Abstract
The possibility to observe transiting exoplanets from Dome C in Antarctica provides immense benefits: stable weather conditions, limited atmospheric turbulence, and a night that lasts almost three months due to the austral winter. However, this site also presents significant limitations, such as limited access for maintenance and internet speeds of only a few KB/s. This latter factor means that the approximately 6 TB of data collected annually must be processed on site automatically, with only final data products being sent once a day to Europe. In this context, we present the current state of operations of ASTEP+, a 40 cm optical telescope located at Concordia Station in Antarctica. Following a successful summer campaign, ASTEP+ has begun the 2022 observing season with a brand-new two-colour photometer with increased sensitivity. A new Python data analysis pipeline installed on a dedicated server in Concordia will significantly improve the precision of the extracted photometry, enabling us to get higher signal-to-noise transit detections. The new pipeline additionally incorporates automatic transit modelling to reduce the amount of manual post-processing required. It also handles the automatic daily transfer of the photometric lightcurves and control data to Europe. Additionally, we present the Python and web-based systems used for selection and scheduling of transit observations; these systems have wide applicability for the scheduling of other astronomical observations with strong time constraints. We also review the type of science that ASTEP+ will be conducting and analyse how unique ASTEP+ is to exoplanet transit research.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2208.04501,
title = {Observation Scheduling and Automatic Data Reduction for the Antarctic telescope, ASTEP+},
author = {Georgina Dransfield and Djamel Mekarnia and Amaury H. M. J. Triaud and Tristan Guillot and Lyu Abe and Lionel J. Garcia and Mathilde Timmermans and Nicolas Crouzet and Francois-Xavier Schmider and Abdelkrim Agabi and Olga Suarez and Philippe Bendjoya and Maximilian N. Gunther and Olivier Lai and Bruno Merın and Philippe Stee},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2208.04501},
year = {2022}
}
Comments
Submitted to SPIE Proceedings